The Intel Core i3 530 Review - Great for Overclockers & Gamers
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 22, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
I like the Core i3 530. It’s the first real alternative Intel offers to AMD’s Phenom II X2 and Athlon II X4 processors. And dare I say that it’s perfectly competitive? With Clarkdale I get the feeling that Intel is actually trying to compete with AMD, instead of run them into the ground.
If you need a fast dual-core processor, the Core i3 530 is right for you. If you need affordable threaded performance, the Athlon II X4 is a better option. Intel attempts to sweeten the deal with TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming support, but ultimately what we have here is a chip that is truly competitive.
The i5s continue to be priced far too high, but that’s where they should be. Intel has a much larger sales and marketing budget than AMD, so put those sales folks to work. AMD (and Intel) offer better value than the entire dual-core i5 line, so it’s up to Intel's marketing to sell those more expensive chips. To those in the know, you'll ignore them almost entirely.
The i3 is the sensible solution. It’s not too perfect. You’re still better off with an Athlon II X4 if you are doing a lot of video encoding or offline 3D rendering, but it’s great for the rest of the market. You lose turbo mode but honestly, with only two cores, you don’t really need it. Instead, just be happy with the fact that you can push nearly 4GHz with minimal effort and without even swapping out the stock heatsink/fan. The lack of AES-NI support keeps the i3 from being the otherwise perfect chip for corporate use, a clever but unfortunate move by Intel.
The competitive angle is even more interesting when you realize that the majority of the dual-core CPUs that AMD sells today are all much cheaper than the Core i3. Maybe it’s Intel playing nice for the FTC, but it almost looks like the two companies have conspired to compete without stepping on each others toes.
Between $60 - $100 you have the Athlon II X2. Then at $100 - $130 you can go with either an i3 or an Athlon II X4. Between $130 and $200 you have a number of Phenom II X4 choices that make sense. And at $200 and above it’s all Lynnfield/Bloomfield. Everyone gets a piece of the pie, Intel just gets the more expensive price points (which to AMD’s credit, aren’t high volume sellers anyway).
AMD technically has the best product at one of the most important price points - $150. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but the competition here just seems...clean.
There you have it. If you want a dual-core processor at around $130, the Core i3 530 is as good as it gets. Competition without killing AMD. I like it.
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dandar - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
Bought 3-pack of win7 pro and these things run beautiful. Fast, win xp mode is supported so every app they had back with win xp still runs. I'm very happy with this platform from Intel. This was a home run in my opinion.raced295 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought it was well understood that Intel uses processor power to accelerate gpu functions. In other words the GPU is not nearly as fast as is appears the drivers offload work to the cpu since it is very powerful. I will try to post links to support this but don't remember them off hand as I thought this was common knowledge on "in depth" sites such as this. I believe that this was going on in part on G45 at least with benchmark software. Also that the driver looks for benchmark exe's and game exe's and manipulates quality and offloads to CPU.It doesn't change much for the end user as its still faster but bottom line I don't think the GPU is as good as it appears. Net performance however is as good as it has shown and this is brilliant of Intel to do.
Submit to the community for thought.
MrSpadge - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
So the integrated GPU can be overclocked really high. Nice, but we're not gaming on this thing anyway.No, what this really means is that the GPU voltage is set unnecessarily high by Intel! We'd be using these integrated GPUs to save power compared to discrete GPUs, not to waste it. It doesn't have sophisticated power management yet, but at least a reasonable voltage would be nice..
sandman1687 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
On the fourth page it says that overclocking without increasing the voltage will not increase power consumption. This is not true; while power is directly proportional to frequency, exponentially to voltage. Could you post some idle and load power figures when overclocked at 4 and even 3.3GHz? I'm always hesitant to raise the CPU voltage. Thanks.-sanders
Rajinder Gill - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
As power consumption and efficiency has become more important, and manufacturing processes improved, how far you can push a CPU without increasing its core voltage appears to be the most efficient way to overclock. You minimize any increases in power consumption while maximizing performance.It does not say the power consumption will not increase, but that you will somewhat minimize the increase by keepingthe voltage at stock.
regards
Raja
MrSpadge - Saturday, January 23, 2010 - link
You're right, but one also needs to keep the absolute value of the stock voltage in mind. A fine example are the initial 45 nm Phenom II chips: reviewers applauded them for being able to OC rather high at stock voltage. However, "stock" in this case meant 1.35 - 1.40 V. That's more or equal to the maximum Intel gave it's 65 nm chips.So either one could argue "great stock voltage OC" or one could say "wasting power by setting a unnecessarily high stock voltage".
MrS
MrSpadge - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
P ~ V^2, not exponential. Some leakage currents scale stronger, but these don't dominate the overall power draw (otherwise the process / design would be pretty bad).sandman1687 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
Sorry, meant quadratic.Finally - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
I compared power draw under LOAD for the Phenom II 965 BE and here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?... you say it draws 274W (sic!), while in your database the same figure is much lower. How come?janm9 - Friday, January 22, 2010 - link
i am looking for the power consumption of the an amd athlon x4 620/605e with the 785G chipset. i can not find a review using just onboard graphics. the anandtech benchmark database is nice, but it only lists power consumption with either the 5870 or geforce 280gtx.i myself have run into problems ( artifacts ) under windows 7 with both media center and MPC-HC in 64bit with DXVA too.
thank you for writing an interesting article :)